from gasolinealleyantiques.com

• Just a reminder: I’ll be reporting (perhaps even “liveblogging,” just perhaps) Sunday from the hydroplane races.
• And another reminder: The hydroplane boats are the stars of Seafair Sunday. The Blue Angels are the intermission act, and as such are expendable.
• Today’s sermon against the waterfront tunnel project comes from activist Cheryl dos Remedios, who implores “Seattle’s arts and heritage community” to oppose the scheme.
• You know when the Uptown Theater closed, and I said it was too bad SIFF didn’t take it over? Guess what—SIFF’s taking it over.
• An AIDS remembrance billboard on the Broadway light-rail station construction fence was censored, because it showed a small blurry image of a guy’s butt. It’s another example of how our civic establishment prides itself on accepting alternative sexualities, but only as long as people don’t get too, you know, sexual about it.
• An Army vet claims he was tortured by his fellow Americans as a prisoner in Iraq. His suit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cleared a legal hurdle this week.
• Michael Moore remembers when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Moore calls it the start of the war on the middle class.
• Paul Krugman asks why the heck anybody still trusts those mortgage-bubble-crisis abettors at Standard & Poor’s anyway.
• Catch-22 of the week: Employers only hiring folks if they’re already employed somewhere else.
• Now that you’ve read this (and perhaps the articles linked hereto), go look at something real for a few moments to reduce “computer vision syndrome.”

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

Some of the soon to be exiled 619 Western artists held a hastily arranged art sale in the parking lot outside the doomed studio building. Almost as much fun as the real studio experience. Almost.

Meanwhile in Belltown, CoCA exhibited all 100 pieces of Indonesian artist Haris Purnomo’s work Visitation. These identical white infants with tattoos on their faces and knife blades emerging from their wraps had previously been displayed, partly, at CoCA’s little side street showcase booth near the Olympic Sculpture Park. The whole installation goes next to the Saatchi Gallery in London.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

You still have a chance to view the five “MadHomes” along Bellevue Avenue E. They’re open to the public until this Sunday, Aug. 7, noon to 7 p.m. each day.

These house-sized art installations are the brainchild of Alison Milliman. Her organization, MadArt, is dedicated (according to its web site, madartseattle.com) “to bring art into our lives in unexpected ways, and to create community involvement in the arts.”

MadArt curated last year’s sculpture show in Cal Anderson Park and a store-window art display in Madison Park.

But MadHomes vastly outscales either of those projects.

The show’s contributing artists have taken the outsides of the four houses and the insides of three of them (one was still occupied as a residence), plus their front yards and side setbacks, as a three-dimensional canvas, as a setting for “site specific” and interactive works meant to last only three weeks.

And because the houses are going away (to be replaced by a long-delayed condo project). the artists didn’t have to leave the structures the same way they found them.

This meant Allan Packer, one of the show’s artists, could cut holes in floors, walls, and ceilings, from which his cut-out animal figures emerge to greet visitors (as aided by large mechanical devices mainly hidden in the basement).

It also meant Meg Hartwig could freely nail big wood scraps to both a house and to a tree in front of it (which will also be lost to the condo project).

You’ll also see a lot of work that plays in less “invasive” ways with its setting.

These include the SuttonBeresCuller trio’s “Ties That Bind,” comprising 12,000 feet of red straps winding back and forth through one house and along a setback to a second house, creating a labyrinth through the side yard.

They also include Troy Gua’s “Chrysalis (Contents May Shift In Transit),” in which one house has been entirely covered in shrink wrap with a giant bar code sticker.

There are also pieces that could theoretically be re-installed elsewhere upon MadHomes’ conclusion.

One of these is Allyce Wood’s “Habitancy.” She’s mounted “tension-wound” string on and between upstairs walls in one of the houses, depicting silhouettes of imagined former occupants (including at least one dog).

Another is Laura Ward’s “Skin.” Ward painted one of the houses with latex rubber, then peeled it off, then stitched those molded pieces into a smaller replica of the house, placed over a tent-like frame.

•

None of this would have been possible without the gracious cooperation of the houses’ current owner, the development company Point32. That company’s going to turn the quarter-block into one long three-story building and an adjoining six-story building at the lot’s north side. The project will adjoin and incorporate the existing Bel Roy Apartments at the northeast corner of Bellevue and East Roy Street.

MadHomes has also drawn the approval of the lot’s previous owner, Walt Riehl. He happens to be an arts supporter and a member of the Pratt Fine Arts Center’s board.

•

Besides being a fun and creative big spectacle, MadHomes means something.

It’s a call for more whimsy and joy in the everyday urban landscape.

Especially now that the new-construction boom has resumed after a two-plus year pause, at least on Capitol Hill.

So many of the big residential and mixed-use projects built on the Hill in the previous decade lack these very elements.

Oh sure, a lot of them are all modern and upscale looking, with clean lines, snazzy cladding, and exterior patterns that make every effort to hide the buildings’ boxy essences.

But there’s something missing in a lot of these places. That something could be described as adventure, delight, or fun.

I’m not asking for huge conceptual art components, of a MadHomes scale, installed into every new development. That wouldn’t be practical.

But there could be little touches that attract a passing eye and give a momentary lift to a tired soul.

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POSTSCRIPT: Eugenia Woo sees MadHomes as not a temporary artistic triumph but an urban preservation defeat. At the blog Main 2 (named for an old Seattle telephone exchange), Woo states that the homes, while under-maintained in recent years, could and should have been kept:

Everyday (vernacular) houses for everyday people represent Seattle’s neighborhoods. The drive for increase urban density does not always have to come at the price of preservation and neighborhood character.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times. Thanks to Marlow Harris of SeattleTwist.com.)

• Those newfangled “3-D printers” can even be used to make motor-powered small airplanes.
• A judge knocked down the feds’ long-term plans for Columbia River salmon restoration, calling them vague and insufficient.
• The Belltown P-Patch cottages, the neighborhood’s last remaining “single family home” structures, are getting their old lead paint stripped off and replaced.
• Thanks to federal funding cuts and other snafus, 400 otherwise homeless people could get kicked out of local shelters soon.
• Dominick Holden has a handy primer on why you should reject the deep bore tunnel.
• You don’t have to go to the “whole paycheck” store to know “healthy” food can be costly.
• What’s really wrong with American discourse? Tabitha Justice believes it’s the “argument culture.”
• Ending on a lighter note, here’s some hilarious-in-retrospect images of completely ineffectual “disguising” by the East German secret police.

I’ve spent the day lost in the past.

I’ve done that before. But never quite like this.

I’ve been buried this afternoon in old Seattle Times articles, ads, and entertainment listings. They’ve been scanned from old library microfiche reels and posted online by ClassifiedHumanity.com.

The site’s anonymous curators scour back SeaTimes issues from 1900 to 1984.

The site’s priorities in picking old newspaper items include, but are not limited to:

• Strange crimes.
• Local historical figures.
• Drug scare items.
• Early home computers and video games.
• The anti-commie “red scare.”
• Ads for old local stores.
• Movies that have remained popular among the “geekerati,” such as the original Star Wars.
• Individual out-of-context panels from old comic strips, especially Nancy.
• Casual racism.
• Reactionary editorials.

Go to Classified Humanity yourself. But don’t be surprised if hours pass before you walk away from the computer.

bachmann family values?

• No, Michele Bachmann, slaves did not have stable marriages and families. Not when spouses could be re-sold to separate masters or be used as involuntary sex toys.
• Today’s anti-deep-bore-tunnel sermon comes to you in the form of cute CGI cartoon characters with synthesized voices.
• As for the tunnel project we like, the Capitol Hill light-rail tunnel is being dug by a 21-foot-wide boring machine nicknamed “Brenda.” Make your own 90210 jokes here.
• Painting murals on street surfaces—do they reduce traffic speeds, or encourage dangerous games of pedestrian hopscotch?
• The Midwestern union buster wannabes who now run Boeing are being very secretive in their “southern strategy.”
• Admitting your addiction to Facebook is the first step toward regaining control of your life. Yes, I found this link from Facebook.
• Woke up, it was a Chelsea mornin’ and the first thing that I heard was the historic hipster hotel’s been sold to speculators who want to turn it into rich folks’ residences.
• Post-made-up-“crisis” updates: Joe Biden allegedly called Congressional Republicans “terrorists.” Less famous commenters say the GOPpers are waging a “war on America” and claim they “fit the profile of the classic abuser.” Another e-pundit wonders whether the Bushies deliberately left the nation incurably “bankrupt, corrupt, ungovernable.”
• On a lighter note, here’s some fun stuff found at Grocery Outlet.

• Legendary skyjacker D.B. Cooper might have finally been tracked down. Dead, of course. (As all real fans of the legend know, the alias he really gave to Northwest Airlines was “Dan Cooper.” Turns out there had been a French comic book hero of that name.)
• Stuck for one more summer month with bored, pouting offspring (of the fem. variety)? Send ’em to the new American Girl doll store in Alderwood Mall. (I personally like that the American Girl brand/phenomenon teaches the history of everyday life, which is just as important as the history of politicians and generals if not more so.)
• AP headline: “Woman’s Facebook breakup lawsuit against Kennewick man dismissed.” No, not that Kennewick Man.
• As anti-tunnel advocates held a march on City Hall Monday, TheSunBreak.com dissected a couple of Seattle Times pro-highway-construction editorials. The editorials were published in 1967. The highway they were supporting was the R.H. Thompson Expressway, which would have basically eliminated much of the Central District and obliterated much of the Arboretum. The Arboretum’s famous “ramps to nowhere” were built to connect State Route 520 to the Thompson, which was thankfully rejected by voters who’d rejected the Times’ arguments—arguments mightily similar to the paper’s pro-tunnel arguments these days.
• In made-up-national-crisis news, Keith Olbermann angrily lashes back on the debt deal, calling for a mass movement bent on “taking back governance from politicians.”
• To the contrary, here are two web-based pundits who insist Obama actually won this one. Stacie Borrello insists that “Obama and the Dems are the ones who outplayed the GOP,” leaving House Republicans “trying to save face.” And Spandan Chakrabarti (aka “Deaniac83”) claims that (contrary to what relative know-nothings like Paul Krugman might claim)…

Barack Obama ate John Boehner’s lunch, and then he turned Boehner out to go preach to his conservative colleagues that this eating of the lunch by Obama is actually politically good for them.

Another summer, another Seafair Torchlight Parade, the oldest, biggest, and (alas) clothed-est of Seattle’s three big summer parades.

It’s been billed by some local wags as a taste of the suburbs in the middle of town. But that’s not quite the case. A lot of the “forgotten Seattle” shows up too. Working families, even with children. Public school children even.

Some attendees chose to forego the standard T-shirts and shorts uniform.

Teachers’ union picketers showed up to appeal to the family friendly crowd, campaigning for increased school funding and fewer state-mandated tests.

Then the parade itself got underway with its new title sponsor, Alaska Airlines (replacing rival Southwest). In keeping with nostalgia for pre-TSA era air travel, Alaska featured an all-flight-attendant drill team.

Mr. Drew Carey was a thorough professional, shaking hands, kissing babies, selling soccer scarves.

Then, at last, came the real entertainment. The drill teams.

The marching bands.

The floats.

The Clowns and the Pirates.

Yes, the parade could become “hipper” (even while remaining G rated).

But why should it?

Squares need some celebration in their lives too.

qr code carpet by nikolaus gradwohl; from local-guru.net

• Those smartphone-scannable “QR codes” are showing up everywhere these days—even on gravestones.
• Our ol’ pal Riz Rollins offers an account of confronting an old woman lying down on the floor in a public place, then realizing it’s a sculpture, then realizing it’s a sculpture of someone he knows. Then the story begins to get weird.
• The Wash. state legislature’s either imposing or recommending pay cuts for lots of state employees. Guess who’s exempted?
• The HQ of one of the key organizations organizing Wisconsin’s recall drive against anti-democracy legislators mysteriously burned.
• In nat’l. politix, Sam Parry patiently delineates and explains “The Big Fat GOP Budget Lie;” while Wendy Gittleson expands upon just why business tycoons make lousy government officials.

sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Thursday was “Last Thursday” at the beloved 619 Western art studios. This low-key ending came after 30 years of magic and memories (including two events curated by this web-correspondent), and about a year of wrangling with the city and the state. (The latter wants to drill its viaduct replacement tunnel under the building, and claims the 1910 warehouse structure’s too unsound, in its current condition, to withstand being dug under.)

The 100-some tenants in the building’s six floors thought they had an agreement to get out of the building by next February, while the city offered relocation assistance. Any hope of actually preserving 619 for artists, during or after any rehab, seemed to dissolve away during these negotiations.

Then, earlier this month, came the surprise. The city decided the whole place was just too unsafe even for short-term occupancy. Everybody had to be out by October 1. Public events in the building were banned effective Aug. 1.

One final “First Thursday” was hastily scheduled, retitled “Last Thursday.”

One last chance to ride Seattle’s third coolest elevator.

One last chance to pay respects to the memory of Su Job, the building’s heart and soul for so many years.

One last chance to admire the familiar rickety stairwells.

One last chance to admire, and buy, locally-produced art in the corridors and the studios. (Only some of the building’s spaces were open this final night. Many tenants were already packed or packing up.)

Yes, 619’s got structural damage.

Yes, it needs shoring up, even if the tunnel project’s stopped.

And maybe its occupants would have to split the premises during a rehab, if not sooner.

But it still didn’t have to go down like this.

And I still want the place preserved, as an artist space.

(Some artists will sell their wares outside 619 next First Thursday, Aug. 4. That same evening, a tribute show to the building, Works of History: 30 Years of Anarchy, opens at Trabant Coffee, 602 2nd Ave.)

• Another local bicyclist was struck, and at this writing remains in critical condition, after getting struck by a hit-and-run driver (in, as if you hadn’t guessed, an SUV).
• Crooks in a local art heist had very specific tastes. They only took stuff by one guy, Hispanic-heritage painter Esteban Silva.
• The NY Observer claims Brooklyn’s becoming more like Portland, or rather like the Portlandia Portland.
• Could “Sonics Appreciation Night” at tonight’s Mariners game be one of the greatest single events in M’s history? It’ll certainly rank among this sorry year’s highlights.
• Besides the usual fringe-right-wing suspects, here’s someone else who seems to believe the Norway massacre wasn’t all that awful. It’s Morrissey. He apparently thinks the existence of fast food is a worse crime.
• James Warren, who knew Obama back when, insists the guy’s no Clinton “centrist” but a seeker of deals, a professional bargainer. But is he enough of a hard bargainer?
• Meanwhile, even John Boehner is apparently not looney-right enough for the looney-right…
• …While Robert Reich suggests another force pressuring the Democrats into caving to shock-treatment budget cuts—the Wall St. bond rating cartel.
• The traditionally cars-before-people Eastside is getting its very own light rail line. Sometime in the next decade. Unless Bellevue Square tycoon Kemper Freeman, who hates transit, has his way and stops it.
• Science Guy 1, Fox News 0.

menu screen from 'mickey, donald, goofy: the three musketeers'

• We’ve just gotten over the official end of VHS a couple years ago, when now some are predicting the DVD’s similar fate. Sure, online streaming is cool if you have the bandwidth and can stand the re-buffering pauses at inopportune moments. But what about the bonus features? I’ll say it again: what about the bonus features? I want my bonus features, dammit!
• Our long local nightmare is over. What did it take to get the Mariners to actually win a baseball game after three ghastly, fallow weeks? Perhaps it was the sudden, tragic passing of one of the team’s charter employees (and best loved stadium figures), Rick the Peanut Guy.
• The city’s got a new Transit Master Plan. It identifies corridors that could use some transpo beefing up. One of them is Ballard (where, if you recall, the Monorail Project was to have gone). Now the city thinks it’d be a nice place for a streetcar (which, unlike a monorail, will be subject to the same traffic jams as cars). (BTW, this wish list is irrelevant to the more vital task, that of preserving what transit options we’ve got now from budgetary decimation.)
• On the national front, Jim Hightower pleads for any national politician to pay attention to working people instead of partisan idiocy; while Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains why Obama can’t take the big unilateral steps on the economy that FDR took. And Andrew Sullivan calls today’s GOP “not conservatives but anarchists,” obsessed only with destroying the Obama presidency even if the nation’s destroyed along with it.
• With its never-say-die attitude toward expanding its range of market segments, Costco’s re-formulated initiative to privatize liquor sales has qualified for the November ballot.
• And remember, tonight’s “Last Thursday,” the final public event in the prematurely condemned 619 Western artist studios.